The Office Pool
by iworkwithpens
Summary: Breaking news tends to come in cycles. Inevitably, there is some downtime. What exactly does the staff at NewsNight do when they're bored? And, more importantly, what do their bosses do when they find out about it?


**Author's Notes: First of all, this story is in response to a prompt LilacMermaid gave me. My instructions were to use the following three things in a story: a raincoat, an office betting pool, and the ingredients for Cosmopolitans. Lilac and I, and all the other ladies over on the Newsroom Writer's Group, have been having quite a bit of fun with these little 3 things prompts. Thanks ladies…it's been a blast! Secondly, I really am trying to finish Bar Tabs and Birthdays, but the last chapter is giving me trouble. I have another multi-chapter fic completed, but I have been waiting to post it until I finish Bar Tabs…at this rate the bloody thing will never get posted! Keep your fingers crossed! This story is meant to take place a month or so after the season one finale. Enjoy! **

Will was seething. No wait, that wasn't the adjective he wanted to use to describe himself at the moment. He was incensed, irate, fuming! He was just really fucking mad! Did they all think this was some sort of a fucking joke?! This was his life they were talking about…joking about…_betting_ about!

He paced back and forth in front of the elevators waiting for one to appear. He had to get out of here. He had to calm down before he fired someone…or killed someone.

Thankfully, he heard the dinging of the bell signaling the arrival of an elevator. He stomped into it and nearly ran Mackenzie over as she tried to exit at the same time he tried to enter.

"Did you know?!" he shouted, his face contorted with anger.

"Did I know what?" she asked, trying to pull off her raincoat and head toward her office. He pulled her back onto the elevator and pushed the down button.

"Did you know about _this?" _ he asked, shoving the cell phone into her face. She had to pull out her damn reading glasses to make sense of what he was showing her. She hated the fucking things…they made her look old.

"Is this what I think it is?" she said, peering at the screen, her forehead scrunched up in concentration. If only she knew what that intense look did to him. The recent addition of reading glasses only made it worse. He loved those glasses…they made her look so damn sexy.

He momentarily forgot what he was so upset about. But then he heard her sharp intake of breath and he knew she was just as stunned as he was. They both knew that everyone in the office liked to joke about their tempestuous relationship, and neither of them took offense at the occasional remark, but this was too much. This trivialized the most important and most heartbreaking thing in their lives.

"Oh God" she said, skimming her way through the list. He knew the moment she must have reached the end of it. She slumped back against the wall of the elevator and pulled off her glasses. "I need a drink" she muttered.

"It's 9:30 in the morning Mac" he said, his anger fading as he became more and more concerned for her, and less and less concerned with his reputation or his privacy.

"Who the hell cares?" she asked him. "I thought they were our friends Will. I thought they cared." He watched as a stray tear slid down her cheek.

He would kill them! He would rip Neal and Jim and Sloan and whoever else had known about this limb from limb!

"I think they are. They just have a little too much time on their hands. I fully intend to remedy that situation" he replied, rubbing his hands together in evil glee.

"You look a little too happy about that Will" she chuckled.

"Thinking about my revenge is the first time this list has made me smile" he admitted. "Come on, let the rest of them squirm and wonder where we are. Let them try to put together a show without an E.P or an anchor."

"Where are we going?" she asked, dropping her reading glasses into her purse and wrapping her coat around her securely.

"To get a drink!"

"Will, aren't you the one who just reminded me that it's not even 10am yet? Where exactly are we going to get said drink?"

"Come with me. I know a place" he assured her. They grabbed a cab, because Will wasn't about to sit around and wait for Lonny to appear, and he really doubted a crazed fan had waited outside AWM on the off-chance that his staff pissed him off and forced him to leave the office a mere twenty minutes after he had arrived.

"We're going to your apartment?" she asked, after he handed the cabbie a fifty dollar bill and gave him the address and told him to step on it. Funny, he had lived in Manhattan for more than a decade and he had never once before had the opportunity to tell a cab driver to step on it. What was next? Follow that car? He laughed despite himself.

"What's so funny?" she asked, still fuming from the list she had read moments ago.

"Them. Us. This whole fucking situation Mac. We work with an office full of raucous twenty-somethings and what are they doing with their free time? Taking bets on what their forty and fifty year old bosses do behind closed doors!"

She couldn't help herself…she started to laugh too. It was like high school all over again. Only, for some bizarre reason, _she and Will_ were the cool kids! The ones all the other kids gossiped about! She had never been cool. It was about fucking time! She laughed, as she trailed behind him, upstairs to his apartment.

Will wandered into his kitchen, calling out for Mackenzie to follow him, but she stopped cold near the bar in the corner of the room.

"Mac?" he asked, wondering why her earlier laughter in the cab had died down now.

"You kept everything the same?" she asked, looking at the bottles of Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon stored in the wine cooler underneath the surface of the bar and all the makings for Cosmopolitan's set up near his bottles of scotch and bourbon. Will drank nothing but scotch and bourbon…he would have no need for the rest of this. Wine and Cosmos had always been her drinks of choice.

She looked up to find him ducking his head. He was caught red-handed.

"It seemed too lonely and somehow too stereo-typically male of me to just have scotch and bourbon and whiskey in my bar. I liked the way all of your favorite things looked over there. I would have missed them" he admitted. He handed her a bottle of water from the kitchen. They sat on the couch sipping their water quietly… lost in thought.

"I thought you said you knew a place where we could get a drink. Water wasn't what I had in mind" she admitted a few minutes later.

"I know, but I figured you and I are about to get well and truly smashed my dear, we better hydrate ourselves first."

He could see that he had stunned her…momentarily silenced her next question. He loved it when he was able to do that.

"I thought we were just angry at them? Why are we trying to drown our sorrows before the sun is over the yardarm?" she asked.

"Good God! Did you have something to drink _before_ you came to the office Mac? When the hell did you start using phrases like the sun over the yardarm?!" he sputtered.

"You learn all sorts of colorful language when you spend months with the troops Will. Don't piss me off. You don't want to know how foul-mouthed I can be these days" she warned. She smiled though when she said it, and that took some of the sting out of her words. The way she had just casually referred to her time in the Middle East, without recrimination or regret, only as a simple fact.

They were getting better at that these days. At remembering their time apart as something that was merely a bad time that was better left forgotten and not dredged up and agonized over. Maybe that's why that list had hurt them both so much. Didn't the staff understand that they were finally _getting there_? It wasn't something to joke about anymore. It had taken eighteen months and a hospital stay, but they were working on it, damn it!

He got up and headed over toward the kitchen for some cranberry juice. He took it to the bar and began combining it with gin and triple sec and lime juice. He poured himself a tumbler of scotch and brought their drinks back over to the couch. She had been watching him intently this whole time and thinking about what she wanted to say, if her endless worrying of her lip between her teeth was any indication.

"What bothered you the most? That they formed an office pool about our relationship or that a lot of it was surprisingly accurate?" she asked as she took her drink from him.

"Either…both…I don't know Mac. You and I can still barely talk about it. It's none of their damn business. Despite the fact that you emailed them all and sort of made it their business" he laughed mirthlessly.

"Shut up Billy. I'm trying to get drunk" she admonished.

"Shouldn't take long. You weigh about as much as your average high school sophomore" he said, playfully nudging her thigh.

"I resent that remark Will. I have held my own with many a Marine" she replied, but she was already looking highly relaxed after just one Cosmo. He got up to refresh her drink.

"Which one bothered _you_ the most Mac?" he asked, referring to the list of questions they had read off of Neal's cell phone less than an hour earlier. "Oh shit!" he exclaimed, reaching into his pocket.

"What?!" she asked, clearly concerned that he was remembering something awful from the betting pool.

"I took the kid's phone!" he shouted, and then began laughing hysterically. She joined in and soon they were pillowed against each other on the sofa, trying not to spill their drinks as they looked at the pilfered electronic device.

"Serves him right! Serves _them_ right!" Mackenzie shouted. "So, which one was the worst Will?" she asked, nodding at the phone again.

"I don't know. I'm not too thrilled about any of them Mac. I'm not surprised that they discuss the likelihood of us getting back together, it's just the detail with which they dissected it that disturbs me. They're talking about our sex life Mackenzie! When the hell did that become any of their concern?!" he shouted, downing the rest of his drink.

"_What_ sex life Will? _We_ haven't _had_ a sex life in nearly five years" she grumbled with dissatisfaction.

"I think that was the whole point of some of those questions Mac. And I quote" he began, lifting the cell phone up again so he could read from the betting pool. "Who will crack first? Whose sexual frustration is worse? How long can this possibly go on?"

Just as he was about to set Neal's phone down, it began to ring. They both jumped back as if burned.

"Why the hell are we acting like _we've_ done something wrong?" he asked, then slammed the phone down on the table.

"I think it's the last question on the list that bothered me the most" she admitted tearfully, referring to the oh-so-painful 'will they last this time?' question.

"That would never happen Mackenzie. If we manage to put us back together again there wouldn't be a time frame…an expiration date. If we aren't both damn sure we can make it last, as the kids so lovingly phrased it, we wouldn't put ourselves through the pain. Been there, done that."

"Bought the t-shirt" she agreed.

"Another?" he asked, reaching for her glass and wondering if this was really such a good idea. The last time he had gotten this drunk he ended up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. But that was because the scotch had been used to wash down several Effexors and Naproxen. And because he was lamenting the loss of Mackenzie McHale. This time she was right here next to him. Maybe that was _more _dangerous, he thought to himself.

Thankfully, one of them had the presence of mind to text Charlie before they got any more socially lubricated, and informed him of their plans to skip the show that night. But that was where their planning and forethought ended. They proceeded to ignore the rest of the phone calls, emails and texts that they received the rest of that day and evening. They also proceeded to fall into bed and answer several of those office pool questions.

"Oh sweet Jesus! How many Cosmos did you make me last night?" Mackenzie moaned early the next morning.

"Four? Five?" he asked, most likely rhetorically. Neither one of them probably knew the answer.

"Will?" she asked meekly.

"No, I don't regret it Mackenzie. I do regret that I don't remember a lot of it, but we'll just have to do something about that later, once we're both sober and a little less hungover" he reassured her.

"Ok, me too" she said, kissing him on the cheek and setting off in search of a robe, some aspirin and some coffee.

They both donned very dark sunglasses and leaned against each other in Lonny's SUV and wished like hell that the pounding in their heads would stop. They dragged themselves upstairs and when they entered the bullpen all noise stopped. Will walked over to Neal's desk and slapped his cell phone down in front of him.

"First off, the rumors and gossip stop here and now. We would like to think of you all as our friends, but first and foremost you are our employees, and your discussion of our private life ceases immediately. Second, if anyone here thought they were going to make some money on our misery, you were wrong. You will all be making a lovely donation to the charity of our choosing. Place your money in this envelope and deliver it to my office by the end of the day. And finally, the answers to those questions you wanted answered were: I cracked first, it would be impossible to calculate which one of us was the more sexually frustrated, and we held out exactly eighteen months, three weeks and five days. And we will last forever."

They left a stunned and silent newsroom in their wake…and it felt amazing.


End file.
